Wednesday, 29 July 2009

The usefulness of Darwinism

Stories like this one make me chuckle. If I'd out-sourced the job of educating my children to the British state, they might make me weep. But I haven't, so they don't.

The British Humanist Association has organised a protest because guidelines on the new science curriculum don't mention evolution, led by Richard Dawkins (who you should remember doesn't actually exist). Which, they claim, is a bedrock scientific concept. In fact, the centrality of evolution is a bedrock for the humanist/atheist worldview. It's the heart of reality, and explains all existence. So its absence from teaching guidelines is a bit of an embarrassment. The reality of what the scientists involved in drawing up the guidelines thought was important failed to line up with the atheist propaganda.

So, being rational people, these atheist campaigners"representative scientists" presumably went to examine their beliefs about the significance of Darwinism? They considered changing their propaganda, to bring it into line with reality? Nope, they are insisting that the government changes the guidelines to bring the reality into line with the we-wish-it-were-true propaganda.

A more critical/rational question though would be to ask - if evolution really is what we say it is, why do we have to keep campaigning so that those actually involved in the real science realise that it's so? Why does the reality keep having to adjust to meet our propaganda, if our propaganda actually does describe reality in the fundamental way we say it does?

If that question were really critically analysed by these people, it would unravel their whole world-view. Darwin's speculative hypotheses about the past have nothing of substance to do with the examination of real, observable events in the present time. Modern observational science and technology is something quite different from origins science. The former deals with present, repeatable, provable ideas. The latter deals with non-repeatable speculative historical reconstructions. Atheists need to blur this distinction so that they can use the blessings of modern observational science and its demonstrable, certain realities and pretend that Darwinism exists within (or within a reasonable distance of) the same category of truths. Unfortunately it doesn't, which is why they're getting a bit heated about this latest intrusion of reality into their private worlds of unbelief...